[greiskul]

No. Just no. First of all, anedoctal evidence doesn't mean anything. Sure, women are sexually haressed at technological jobs, but women are haressed EVERYWHERE. And men are also a minority in lots of professions, is that because the women majority on those fields haresses men that try to enter their area?

I suggest that you watch the first episode of this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

If you don't have the time, atleast think about the result of this experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#...

"Research on one day old babies have found that boys look longer at a mechanical mobile while girls look longer at a face. This, as well as the effects of fetal testosterone on later behavior, is argued to be evidence against the sex differences being only due to socialization"

[whateverer]

Your evopsych argument doesn't explain the drop in female enrollment rate since the 80s.

[fosk]

You can't explain something like that without considering the context, the social/work environment of those years, that led to this change. It may just have been that, for example, since the 80s new interesting fields were born or discovered by women, thus reducing their interest in computer science. This factor, for example, may have led to men predominance in the field, and that subsequently may have led to new scenarios/environments again, and so on till nowadays.

I'm sure that if there was a time when multitude of women were interested in CS probably today there would be more of them, and less men. That's unequivocal. Environments change, always in every field.

[roguecoder]

Your hypothesis has the convenient feature that it lets men off the hook, but given that the "social/work environment" is male-dominated, surely they have agency over it.

Rather than a "lack of interest", I offer alternative Wildly Made Up Explanations For Why Women Left Software Engineering In Droves and Had CS Enrollment Fall: A) they may have been discouraged or prevented from studying a subject: Grace Hopper, for example, would have been an engineer but was prevented because she was a woman. Instead she studied math, as did many early female computer scientists. When Computer Science programs became common they may have hewed closer to the Engineering approach than Math, and when they became expected for programming jobs it may have closed off the pathway women had been taking into the field. B) They may have faced harassment or hostile environments that discouraged them from pursuing a coding career. That is not them "being interested", it is "them being willing to tolerate the environment they were required to study or work in." C) They may have faced discrimination in hiring, promotions, pay or been preferentially tracked into project management roles. You can't work in a profession if no one will hire you, and you can't advance if employers will only promote you into a non-technical role. D) they may have faced impossible-to-reconcile expectations on their time, if they were unable to find employment working regular hours and so utilize child care. Men being willing to be a primary care giver is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I'm not saying any of these are true: I am saying that in the absence of any evidence my wildly made up speculations are just as likely to be true as yours. None of those things have to do with interest in technology, programming or working as a programmer. They all implicate the men who changed the social/work environment of computer science in ways that discouraged or excluded women. They are also all things that we could fix.

I'd rather focus on explanations that offer disprovable models we can use to fix the issues at hand if they turn out to be correct. Your approach is like looking at a crash report and being content with the explanation, "something obviously happened that was outside of expected parameters."

When I read the article, I want the next generation of girls and boys to have those moments of joy at technology. I don't want half of them to be turned off by the entirely-irrelevant social/work environment.

[unlogic]

> I'd rather focus on explanations that offer disprovable models we can use to fix the issues at hand if they turn out to be correct.

So you are saying that you would fight one issue rather than another based not on arguments and evidence, but on the fact that the first can be fought and the other cannot (which is itself speculative)?

In my opinion this kind of reasoning has serious flaws. You could see already commenters on HN who say something like "Reading all these posts about sexism and women discrimination I don't want my daughter to work in IT". Doesn't that contradict to what we are fighting for - for bringing more women into IT industry? Doesn't it have to start with equal opportunity for children rather than fear (which in some - many - cases is wrongly induced?

[jleader]

How many "interesting fields" have been "born or discovered by women" since the 80s? Can you name any of these hypothetical fields?

In your 2nd paragraph, are you saying that the statistics about the declining proportion of women CS are wrong? On what do you base this statement?

[parfe]

Sweet, sexism doesn't exist because experience doesn't happen! Forgot I might be talking to a robot and I must have a repeatable scientific experiment to validate my individual experience. Otherwise it means nothing.

Oh, except those rules for a scientifically valid and repeatable study don't count when he cites it himself:

"The evidence for an inborn, male predisposition for systematizing comes from a single experiment on newborn infants, tested with a single person and object. The person was the report's first author, who surely knew the experimental hypotheses and who, we now learn, may have known the sex of the infants whose attention she elicited. The experiment provides no evidence that the basis of infants' preference, if real, had anything to do with the categorical distinction between the displays. Would infants show the same preferences for other face/object pairs? Would they maintain this preference if low-level properties of the two displays, such as their speed of motion, were equated? One need not object to Baron-Cohen's politics to be less than persuaded by his data."[1] says Elizabeth Spelke[2].

Sad Trombone.

Go validate your sexist culture another way. Evopsych:Psychology::Astrology:Astronomy

And yes, I watched that entire clip. It sucked and wasn't worth the time. It's by a comedian who gets scientists with competing models react to each other's statements. And only the newborn baby one has any bearing on gender vs environment when it comes to women avoiding CS.

I'll include another excerpt below because it's just too good to leave out:

" More important, Baron-Cohen fails to consider the extensive evidence that has accumulated, over the last thirty years, on infants' developing understanding of object mechanics. Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems. In most studies, male and female infants are found to discover the same things at the same times. Both males and females come to see the complete shapes of partly hidden objects under the same conditions and at the same ages. They figure out how objects support one another, through the same series of steps. They reach for objects by extrapolating their motions, with equal accuracy. They make the same errors when they search for hidden objects, and they get over those errors at the same time. Sometimes female infants have an edge: In experiments by Laura Kotovsky and Renee Baillargeon, for example, females start to learn about the relation between force and acceleration (the harder a stationary object is hit, the further it goes) a month earlier than males do. Males catch up, however: by 6 1/2 months, you can't tell them apart."

"Whatever the newborn infants in Baron-Cohen's experiment were doing, the male and female participants in three decades of infant research have followed a common path, engaging with objects and people. Infants don't choose whether to systematize or empathize; they do both, and so do we all. Baron-Cohen's categories may seem as quaint as left and right brains by the time his newborn subjects are old enough to read about them."

[1] More at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge158.html (Search for her name as there are a lot of people there tearing Simon Baren-Cohen a new one.)

[2] Her Bio http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html